I thought perhaps a better title for this post was “You'd have to be an idiot not to read blogs“, but realised that's probably offensive (even though anyone who read it would not be an idiot, because they'd be reading a blog anyway). I had a thought today that blogs are becoming integral to my world as a developer, and I'm wondering if the same sort of content can even be found through other “channels“.
There's a couple of good ways of spreading information that I've been part of:
- conferences or other events (might include hand-outs or sample ware)
- personal websites (here I mean like an enthusiast web site, like vbAccelerator)
- articles on websites (like CodeProject, MSDN)
- newsgroups
- direct e-mailing
- mailing list
- forums
- chat rooms (OK, I don't actually use any of these)
- books (but we'll leave these out of the argument)
- blogs
As a developer I can use any or all of these to stay up to date and to make sure I have access to the most up-to-date, applicable knowledge.
I have always thought that the electronic channels I've mentioned above were nearly interchangeable. I have never been a big newsgroup or mailing list user, and only use forums when I've been directed there in a Google search. Of course I use articles and have bookmarked some personal websites: but it's hard to keep up article reading and there's a lot of sites to search through (some paid as well, which I don't check on). I'm only really talking about content delivery here and not the content itself, so it's true that some sites deliver content via RSS, and I suppose that makes it easier to keep track of new content, nearly like a blog.
(I'm a pretty bad mailing list user, I'm more a lurker than a user and very rarely reply. Often someone smarter or with more time or both has made a far better reply before me...sorry, aus-dotnet!)
But for me blogs as a delivery channel have very good business value. I read about people who are solving or have solved problems I'm likely to face. I can get a pretty broad reach from junior developers to the big guns, and both local and international perspectives. And I think that blogs are starting to deliver things that the other channels can't in terms of quick bites of information and almost no overhead to get something to the web (no publishing process, no editors, etc.). Blogs also scale well - as mentioned, I'm on a pretty good mailing list (aus-dotnet), but I doubt that could take lots more users (say, another 200) and still maintain the same quality/signal-to-noise ratio. Ditto newsgroups.
Ken Getz (who I've read for years) has just started a blog and has posted a follow up to a workshop he recently did, with some fixes. If you didn't read his blog you may not have that information. And it would take far more time to (a) mail out the update to all attendees, or (b) put it on a personal website, if you have one (only slightly longer in the second case, but maybe your personal website is also a blog).
So I'm starting to actually rely on blogs. I could argue that they deliver business value to me that other forms of delivery don't. They're not interchangeable with articles, newsgroups or forums (at least not for me). They do form one part of the overall information I receive, one that's becoming a big part. And that's why I think it's important that we deal with issues like identity theft and comment spam (but that's a topic for another day).